The Fallen Sequence (132 page)

When she pressed deeper into his chest, Daniel slid his hands up the sleeves of her sweater and ran his fingers in circles around her arms, as if he were drawing little halos on her skin. “Tell me the best part of all your lives.”

She wanted to say
When I found you, every time
. But it wasn’t as simple as that. It was hard even to think of them discretely. Her past lives began to swirl together and hiccup like the panels of a kaleidoscope. There was that beautiful moment in Tahiti when Lulu had tattooed Daniel’s chest. And the way they’d abandoned a battle in
ancient China because their love was more important than fighting any war. She could have listed a dozen sexy stolen moments, a dozen gorgeous, bittersweet kisses. Luce knew those weren’t the best parts.

The best part was now. That was what she would take with her from her journeys through the ages: He was worth everything to her and she was worth everything to him. The only way to experience that deep level of their love was to enter each new moment together, as if time were made of clouds. And if it came down to it during these next nine days, Luce knew that she and Daniel would risk everything for their love.

“It’s been an education,” she finally said. “The first time I stepped through on my own, I was already determined to break the curse. But I was overwhelmed and confused, until I started to realize that every life I visited, I learned something important about myself.”

“Like what?” They were so high that the suggestion of the Earth’s curve was visible at the edge of the darkening sky.

“I learned that just kissing you didn’t kill me, that it had more to do with what I was aware of in the moment, how much of myself and my history I could take in.”

She felt Daniel nod behind her. “That has always been the greatest enigma to me.”

“I learned that my past selves weren’t always very nice people, but you loved the soul inside of them
anyway. And from your example, I learned how to recognize your soul. You have … a specific glow, a brightness, and even when you stopped looking like your physical self, I could step into a new lifetime and recognize you. I would see your soul almost overlying whatever face you wore in each life. You would be your foreign Egyptian self
and
the Daniel I craved and loved.”

Daniel turned his head to kiss her temple. “You probably don’t realize this, but the power to recognize my soul has always been in you.”

“No, I couldn’t—I didn’t used to be able to—”

“You did, you just didn’t know it. You thought you were crazy. You saw the Announcers and called them shadows. You thought they were haunting you all your life. And when you first met me at Sword & Cross, or maybe when you first realized you cared for me, you probably saw something else you couldn’t explain, something you tried to deny?”

Luce clamped her eyes shut, remembering. “You used to leave a violet haze in the air when you passed by. But I’d blink and it would be gone.”

Daniel smiled. “I didn’t know that.”

“What do you mean? You just said—”

“I imagined you saw
something
, but I didn’t know what it was. Whatever attraction you recognized in me, in my soul, it would manifest differently depending on how you needed to see it.” He smiled at her. “That’s
how your soul is in collaboration with mine. A violet glow is nice. I’m glad that’s what it was.”

“What does my soul look like to you?”

“I couldn’t reduce it to words if I tried, but its beauty is unsurpassed.”

That was a good way of describing this flight across the world with Daniel. The stars twinkled in vast galaxies all around them. The moon was huge and dense with craters, half shrouded by pale gray cloud. Luce was warm and safe in the arms of the angel she loved, a luxury she’d missed so much on her quest through the Announcers. She sighed and closed her eyes—

And saw
Bill
.

The vision was aggressive, invading her mind, though it was not the vile, seething beast Bill had become when she last saw him. He was just Bill, her flinty gargoyle, holding her hand to fly her down from the shipwrecked mast where she’d stepped through in Tahiti. Why that memory found her in Daniel’s arms, she didn’t know. But she could still feel the shape of his small stone hand in hers. She remembered how his strength and grace had astonished her. She remembered feeling safe with him.

Now her skin crawled and she writhed against Daniel uncomfortably.

“What is it?”

“Bill.” The word tasted sour.

“Lucifer.”

“I know he’s Lucifer. I
know
that. But for a while there, he was something else to me. Somehow I thought of him as a friend. It haunts me, how close I let him get. I’m ashamed.”

“Don’t be.” Daniel hugged her close. “There’s a reason he was called the Morning Star. Lucifer was
beautiful
. Some say he was the most beautiful.” Luce thought she detected a hint of jealousy in Daniel’s tone. “He was the most beloved, too, not just by the Throne, but by many of the angels. Think of the sway he holds over mortals. That power flows from the same source.” His voice wobbled, then grew very tight. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of falling for him, Luce—” Daniel broke off suddenly, though it sounded like he had more to say.

“Things were getting tense between us,” she admitted, “but I never imagined that he could turn into such a monster.”

“There is no darkness as dark as a great light corrupted. Look.” Daniel shifted the angle of his wings and they flew back in a wide arc, spinning around the outside of a towering cloud. One side was golden pink, lit by the last ray of evening sun. The other side, Luce noticed as they circled, was dark and pregnant with rain. “Bright and dark rolled up together, both necessary for this to be what it is. It is like that for Lucifer.”

“And Cam, too?” Luce asked as Daniel completed the circle to resume their flight over the ocean.

“I know you don’t trust him, but you can. I do. Cam’s darkness is legendary, but it is only a sliver of his personality.”

“But then why would he side with Lucifer? Why would any of the angels?”

“Cam didn’t,” Daniel said. “Not at first, anyway. It was a very unstable time. Unprecedented. Unimaginable. At the time of the Fall, there were some angels who sided with Lucifer right away, but there were others, like Cam, who were cast out by the Throne for not choosing quickly enough. The rest of history has been a slow choosing of sides, with angels returning to the fold of Heaven or the ranks of Hell until there are only a few unallied fallen left.”

“That’s where we are now?” Luce asked, even though she knew that Daniel didn’t like to talk about how he still had not chosen a side.

“You used to really like Cam,” Daniel said, sliding the subject away from himself. “For a handful of lifetimes on Earth the three of us were very close. It was only much later, after Cam had suffered a broken heart, that he crossed over to Lucifer’s side.”

“What? Who was she?”

“None of us like to talk about her. You must never let on that you know,” Daniel said. “I resented his choice,
but I can’t say I didn’t understand it. If I ever truly lost you, I don’t know what I would do. My whole world would dim.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Luce said too quickly. She knew this lifetime was her last chance. If she died now, she would not come back.

She had a thousand questions, about the woman Cam had lost, about the strange quake in Daniel’s voice when he talked about Lucifer’s appeal, about where she’d been when he was falling. But her eyelids felt heavy, her body slack with fatigue.

“Rest,” Daniel cooed in her ear. “I’ll wake you up when we’re landing in Venice.”

It was all the permission she needed to let herself drift off. She closed her eyes against the phosphorescent waves crashing thousands of feet below and flew into a world of dreams where
nine days
had no significance, where she could dip and soar and linger in the glory of the clouds, where she could fly freely, into infinity, without the slightest chance of falling.

THREE

THE SUNKEN SANCTUARY

D
aniel had been knocking on the weathered wooden door in the middle of the night for what felt to Luce like half an hour. The three-story Venetian town house belonged to a colleague, a professor, and Daniel was certain this man would let them crash, because they had been great friends “years ago,” which, with Daniel, could encompass quite a span of time.

“He must be a heavy sleeper.” Luce yawned, half lulled back into sleep herself by the steady pounding of
Daniel’s fists. Either that, she thought blearily, or the professor was sitting in some bohemian all-night café, sipping wine over a book crammed with incomprehensible terms.

It was three in the morning—their touchdown amid the silvery web of Venice’s canals had been accompanied by the chiming of a clock tower somewhere in the darkened distance of the city—and Luce was overcome with fatigue. She leaned miserably against the cold tin mailbox, causing it to wobble loose from one of the nails holding it upright. This sent the whole box slanting, making Luce stumble backward and nearly hurtle into the murky black-green canal, whose water lapped over the lip of the mossy stoop like an inky tongue.

The whole exterior of the house seemed to be rotting in layers: from the painted blue wood peeling off the windowsills in slimy sheets, to red bricks crawling with dark green mold, to the damp cement of the stoop, which crumbled under their feet. For a moment, Luce thought she could actually feel the city sinking.

“He’s got to be here,” Daniel muttered, still pounding.

When they’d landed on the canal-side ledge usually accessed only by gondola, Daniel had promised Luce a bed inside, a hot drink, a reprise from the damp and bracing wind they’d been flying through for hours.

At last, the slow shuffling of feet thumping down
stairs inside perked a shivering Luce to attention. Daniel exhaled and closed his eyes, relieved, as the brass knob turned. Hinges moaned as the door swung open.

“Who the devil—” The older Italian man’s wiry tufts of white hair stood out at all angles from his head. He had sensationally bushy white eyebrows, a mustache to match, and thick white chest hair protruding from the V-neck of his dark gray robe.

Luce watched Daniel blink in surprise, as if he was second-guessing their address. Then the old man’s pale brown eyes lit up. He lurched forward, pulling Daniel into a tight embrace.

“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to visit before I kicked the inevitable bucket,” the man whispered hoarsely. His eyes traveled to Luce, and he smiled as if they hadn’t woken him, as if he’d been expecting them for months. “After all these years, you finally brought over Lucinda. What a treat.”

His name was Professor Mazotta. He and Daniel had studied history together at the University of Bologna in the thirties. He was not appalled or bewildered by Daniel’s lack of aging: Mazotta understood what Daniel was. He seemed to feel only joy at being reunited with an old friend, a joy that was augmented by the introduction to the love of that friend’s life.

He escorted them into his office, which was also a study of varying degrees of decay. His bookshelves dipped at their centers; his desk was piled with yellowing papers; the rug was worn to threads and splashed with coffee stains. Mazotta set immediately to making each of them a cup of dense hot chocolate—an old man’s old bad habit, he rasped to Luce with a nudge. But Daniel barely took a sip before thrusting his book into Mazotta’s hands and opening it to the description of the first relic.

Mazotta slipped on thin wire-framed glasses and squinted at the page, mumbling to himself in Italian. He stood up, walked to the bookshelf, scratched his head, turned back to the desk, paced the office, sipped his chocolate, then returned to the bookshelf to pull out a fat leather-bound tome. Luce stifled a yawn. Her eyelids felt like they were working hard to hold up something heavy. She was trying not to drift, pinching the inside of her palm to keep herself awake. But Daniel’s and Professor Mazotta’s voices met each other like distant clouds of fog as they argued over the impossibility of everything the other was saying.